Wednesday, August 03, 2016
What Trump should be talking about
If Trump still cared about running for office, he would be making a big deal of this story from ZH.
When a week ago we reported that in a long-overdue decision, the British Columbia government finally cracked down on Vancouver's unprecedented "Chinese hot money" driven housing bubble by implementing a 15% property tax (which we had advocated for one month earlier), we said that "with today's tax, Vancouver's real estate nightmare in which local housing had become the "new normal" anonymous Swiss bank account, and also made real estate virtually unaffordable to local, hard working Canadians, is finally set to end." However, not even we were confident that a 15% tax would be "prove to be a sufficient deterrent to future Chinese buyers." Now thanks to the Financial Post we now know that not only was the tax sufficient, but it has led to the prompt, much anticipated, and generally welcome bursting of the Vancouver housing bubble.In simple terms: TARIFFS WORK. BC didn't need to do anything fancy. Didn't need to create visa controls or investigate the background of the Chinese buyers. Just make the transactions unprofitable, and the transactions will stop. Dead simple.
Labels: Zero Problems
¶ 12:40 PM
